You Want a Hole, Not a Drill: Finding the Right Technology Solution at Law Firms

Law firms are constantly under pressure from clients to decrease costs while increasing efficiency. While the volume of work largely has not changed, firms are expected to do the same work with fewer staff and do it better and faster. Simply put—do more with less. To reconcile these seemingly conflicting demands, many law firms turn to technology as a solution.

The problem is that too often, firms focus on the technology itself, when the emphasis should be on the problems the technology is intended to fix. Technology is not a one-size-fits-all solution. When firms invest in technology without clearly defining the challenges they hope to address, they are setting themselves up for failure. Dissatisfaction becomes inevitable, and firms typically end up blaming the technology for not working, when the blame more likely lies with the failure to properly define the problem, choose the right solution and then implement it.

First, Define the Problem

The simple analogy of a drill and hole perfectly sums up the mistakes many firms make when it comes to investing in technology. The analogy goes like this: When someone buys a drill, the drill is not actually what they want. What they want is a hole, typically of a specific size. They purchase the drill because they believe that the drill will give them the result they seek, i.e, the aforementioned hole.